The Revolt of Aphrodite Summary
The epigraph for Nunquam, from which Durrell derives the titles of both volumes of The Revolt of Aphrodite, is taken from The Satyricon of Petronius: "Aut tunc, aut nunquam." Translated in the epigraph as "It was then or never," and elsewhere by Durrell in the familiar it's-now-or-never formulation, this motif points to a network of related themes, inextricably bound up with each other, which may be stated simply as choice, freedom, enslavement, and contractual obligation. There is, as Durrell notes in his afterword to Nunquam, no mystery in the epigraph from Petronius: "It's always now or never — since we are human and enjoy the fatality of choice. Indeed the moment of choice is always now." This necessity of choice and fatality of choice, together with the consequences thereof, constitutes the principal theme of the work.
Felix Charlock, the narrator and central character, chooses to join "the firm...
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The Revolt of Aphrodite Short Guide
Lawrence Durrell Biographies (5)
1,136 words, approx. 4 pages
A prolific British author, Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) wrote several large-scale, multi-volume series of novels as well as poetry, plays, short stories, and travel books. People and places of the Med...
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5,863 words, approx. 20 pages
Biography EssayA follower in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell explored in his novels the quintessential concerns of the twentieth century: space, time, consciousness, ...
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5,266 words, approx. 18 pages
Following in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell explores in his novels the quintessential concerns of the twentieth century: space, time, consciousness, sexualit...
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4,063 words, approx. 14 pages
Lawrence George Durrell was born in India at Jullundur in the United Provinces, of an Irish mother, Louisa Florence Dixie Durrell, and a British civil-engineer father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell. The aut...
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5,607 words, approx. 19 pages
Until 1957 Lawrence Durrell was an ordinary disaffected Englishman with a passion for writing, seemingly destined to live his life in a series of remote Mediterranean isles in the shadow of his renown...
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